With the Leafs out of the playoffs, it's time to find some silver linings in the last couple of games. For me, I always liked it when the team would give opportunities to their up-and-comers, giving the fans a taste of what is to come, and the staff an opportunity to see if they're ready to make the leap.

Tonight, the Leafs will be doing just that, giving Drew MacIntyre his first ever start and Petter Granberg his first taste of the NHL.

It looks like Tim Leiweke wasn't kidding when he repeatedly stressed his preparation to take action in making the Toronto Maple Leafs a winner as fast as possible. Originally reported by Nik Kypreos and now confirmed by everybody else on the face of the planet, the Leafs have approached Brendan Shanahan for a high-rankings upper management role.

I get why the Leafs Nation is extra pissed off at this year's train wreck.

They just can't take it anymore. They are sick of the losing. They are sick of seeing others teams make the playoffs year after year while the Leafs brass sit around in a board room wondering what the hell went wrong.

As the Leafs see another season wind down without being in the playoff picture, there's a finger that nobody sane could point at; goaltending. Jonathan Bernier and James Reimer have won this team games they've had no business winning, which is probably the reason it took until Game 80 for the last wheel to fall off. But enough about that. Let's talk about a previous Leafs starting goaltender who retired today, Andrew Raycroft.

It's somewhat appropriate that T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men is the most oft-quoted piece of literature in season-ending pieces analyzing the fortunes of sports teams, if not only for its memorable final line "not with a bang but a whimper".

Literature is too easy to analyze, as the phrases can be convoluted in almost every way to appeal to any kind of meaning you want to attach to the piece (I'm reminded of this XKCD comic) and unfortunately, sports has gone down that path.

Anybody who stuck around and read the skeptics this summer should have known that the Maple Leafs weren't the likely playoff-bound team we'd seen last year and the start of this season. Somehow, exactly on March 14th at noon, the Maple Leafs decided that there wasn't a good-enough leader in the dressing room and they were going to lose eight consecutive and earn just four points in the next twelve games and piss away the playoffs.